Sportswomen – a history of not being taken as seriously as the men?

It’s the start of Wimbledon and already the women are being undermined. Michael Stich, BBC commentator and former champion, is quoted as saying that women tennis players are there partly just to look good, adding that their role is as much about ’selling sex’ as it is about playing tennis. On top of this, women champions are notoriously paid much less than their male counterparts, and at the moment it seems that women’s ‘grunting’ is more of a problem than the men’s – simply not ladylike perhaps? At least women tennis players at Wimbledon make the news, there has not been much about the England women’s cricket team despite their winning the World Twenty20 final this month and the 50-over World Cup in March.

It seems to me that there is still a residue of unease about women playing sports competitively. At the end of the nineteenth century (the first Wimbledon tournament took place in 1877) competitive sport was still a symbol of masculinity and team sports were a way for boys’ public schools to instil ‘manliness’ into their pupils. Men competed, but for a woman to compete was to compromise her womanliness. Despite this, around this time women increasingly took up sport, especially at the new colleges for women. Gymnastics was thought to build up their ‘delicate frames’  for study and new activites, such as tennis, hockey and golf, soon followed. However some historians of sport  suggest that the games introduced for women were mostly ‘domesticated’ ones which substituted rules, teamwork and co-operation (think netball or hockey) for the  aggressive competitiveness of men’s sports such as running or rowing.

Maude Watson, Wimbledon Ladies Champion 1884

Whatever women played however, they had to play in a ladylike fashion (no grunts!).  Just look at the attire of the first woman to win Wimbledon in 1884, Miss Maude Watson (who played her sister Lilian in the final, so the Williams’ sisters were not the first!)

It was in the 1920s that French tennis champion Gertrude Ederle, very daringly, pioneered short sleeves and bare legs for women on court. To appear this way was shocking to some early-20C sensibilities as to them it implied overt sexuality – something with Mr Stich, here in the 21C , seems to have got in a muddle with too.